Fanny (Frances) Blake was the sister of Frederick Rudolph Blake of Welwyn, Hertfordshire, the great-grandfather of H.M.G. Bond and E.M.G. Williams.

She was an extremely talented pupil of Peter de Wint and is singled out for special mention in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ of 1851, in a review of an exhibition of the work of amateur watercolorists as an ‘accomplished artist, admirable for truth, completeness and delicacy’.

This watercolour is a record of the previous church of St Patrick at Patterdale which dated from the 14th century and was extensively rebuilt around 1620, known to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Turner. A new church was built at Patterdale by Salvin in the early 1850s after a storm destroyed the building depicted here. The ancient yew tree in this work, thought to have dated back to the Norman Conquest, was destroyed in a storm in 1883.